featured recipe: dirty rice

so this is new: the featured recipe. this will allow me to go into a little more detail on a meal, without overwhelming you, dear reader, with the many details of all our fabulous meals. in the future, i'd like to include multiple pictures of the meal prep, but for this one, you are lucky to be left with only the finished product. bet you didn't know i could make a short post?

why do this now? bryan and i saw julie & julia last week (cute movie!), and i've found myself reading the original julie/julia blog. besides making me want to eat things in butter and cream and wondering if i've been using far too little vermouth all my life, it's made me want to cook from our cookbooks more, and share it. no one may care, but i'll have fun.

i haven't quite decided on the rules of engagement yet. i'm not sure how often a featured recipe will appear here. but i do know that i am going to strive to only cook from our massive collection of cookbooks. oh, and while i'm at it, i suppose i should give a little review/note on the book itself. we've made quite an investment in them, and i usually find myself using recipes online. not that that's a bad thing - there are plenty good ones out there - and i'm sure i'll use some occasionally, when i come across one too good to pass up. oh, and i'll probably allow recipes from our magazine subscriptions (saveur and martha stewart living). but i'm going to try really hard to actually use all those books. there is something very satisfying to me about poring through the pages of a pile of cookbooks.

today's featured recipe is dirty rice, a cajun delight whose name derives from the dirty look the chicken livers give the rice (shannon, you did know you were eating chicken liver, right??).

the recipe i decided to use is one from marvin wood's cookbook The New Low-Country Cooking: 125 Recipes for Coastal Southern Cooking with Innovative Style, of which we own an autographed copy (he gave a cooking demonstration at a festival in decatur one year). the recipe itself is very simple, and i made a few liberal changes, namely including andouille and shrimp.

we've found this cookbook to be rather basic. which isn't all bad - if you've never cooked cajun before or don't plan to a lot, this is a great book for you. it is a little simple for us, but, as evidenced below, gives us a good base to build on. we'd like to pick up a more thorough, involved cajun cookbook at some point, so this isn't our end all, be all, but it doesn't suck either.

the andouille is where the recipe started. while shopping at the outpost, we asked our super awesome butcher (i think i'm going to get him a christmas gift, is that weird?) what was fresh and good. he offered up the andouille he had just made. oh hello, dirty rice with andouille.

below is the recipe from the cookbook, annotated with my changes in italics.

Dirty Rice

2 1/2 cups water
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups long-grain white rice - i used medium grain, as that's what we had
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup finely chopped red onion - i used yellow onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups chicken or turkey livers - i used closer to 1 cup, finely chopped
1 tablespoon Marv Spice (see below)
2 1/4 cups Chicken Stock
1 bay leaf
2 small green bell peppers, chopped (the original recipe didn't call for bell peppers - but i'm smart and know this is part of the cajun trinity so made a trip out to our garden to 'fix' the recipe)
2 andouille sausage, diced
1/2 pound shrimp, cleaned and deveined
4 tablespoons butter
4 - 5 cloves garlic, crushed

Marv Spice
1 tablespoon ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper - i omitted this in order to make it toddler friendly
1 tablespoon celery salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
i also added some crushed dried thyme

In a large saucepan, combine the water, salt, and rice and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the rice is tender, 10 - 12 minutes. Drain and rinse under hot running water to remove the excess starch. Place the rice back in the pan, off the heat, and cover to keep warm.

here, i deviated from the recipe by cooking the sausage in a large saute pan. i removed the sausage, leaving the rendered fat in the pan, and added a small amount of vegetable oil before proceeding.

Heat oil in a large heavy-bottom skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and bell pepper and cook, stirring continuously, until softened but not colored, about 5 minutes. Add the chicken livers and Marv Spice, and cook, stirring frequently, until the livers turn brown, about 8 minutes.

Pour the stock over the rice, set the pan over medium heat, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and stir in the chicken liver mixture and bay leaf. here, i returned the sausage to the pan as well. Cook over low heat, stirring continuously, until the rice is soft and tender, 10 to 15 minutes.

for the shrimp, i slow melted butter in a sauce pan, and added 4 or 5 crushed garlic cloves, and just let that sit over very low heat until i was ready to use it (30 minutes or so). the result was an intensely garlicky butter that i very nearly just sopped up with bread and ate right then. instead, selfless as i am, i turned up the heat a little and popped in the shrimps, turning once, until just done, and served them on top of the rice.

the finished product?


it was quite good. i should have served it with a little louisiana hot sauce, though the anouille had a little spice to it. the shrimp had sucked in that garlic flavor, and were good enough shannon had one and didn't hate it, and she hates shrimp. the rice could have been a little less sticky (i think this was mostly due to using medium grain instead of long grain rice), but tasted very good.

i hope it would have made my new orleans friend mandy proud!